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. . . these questions ages and ages and years and years ago. Just found the answers. I stand by nothing

ET: Who are the gatekeepers in web 2.0 environments? NK: All of us. We're all opinion leaders among our communities. all can be. My blog I see pretty much as my own chance to edit & bring out music writing whenever I want or can. Granted I’m no good at it yet but it’s my tiny empire and I couldn’t give two fucks about what others think we should be directed towards. If by ‘gatekeepers’ you mean glassy-eyed delusional fuckwits like that utter cunt Weingarten or Pitchfork or newly-webified traditional media corporations then I consider them a total irrelevance: these are the fucks who will blithely talk about how the future of music is about access and it all flowing like water whilst allowing rapacious multimedia-corporations to step into the same shapes and confines of the auld music industry. But yeah, like I say, I may have misunderstood your question. ET: Do you read music…

OK, YA WANNA KNOW what the new LP sounds like, right? Oh, man, oh Jesus, it's the bomb, baby. It's incredible. It's the LP that's gonna make Wu-Tang Clan the biggest hip hop band in history. But, until they sort their live shit out, they'll never be perfect. And that's a damn shame.

Tonight is an enjoyable chaos at best, a f***ing shambles at worse, and all points in-between. Tonight is like Jesus rising from the tomb, stubbing his toe, bumping his head and falling over wailing "Mr Grimsdale". Tonight is a chance forsaken.

And that chance is the motherlode. Wu-Tang, like most bands who develop in isolation from the mainstream then storm it (Manics, Public Enemy), are world-size. Theirs is the most complete aesthetic extant in Nineties pop. A whole new imagery, a whole new music, a whole new rap. Something that you either get or never will, that you realise will occupy you into the…

(for World Book Day - I don't do them often but this was my book of 2015. Review originally appeared in Wire mag, issue 381) DON’T SUCK, DON’T DIE: GIVING UP VIC CHESNUTT KRISTIN HERSH (University Of Texas Press, Austin)
You don’t have to be familiar with the work of either Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh, or Vic Chesnutt himself, to draw deep from this memoir. If you’re a fan of Hersh, you’ll recognise and relish the voice, the directness, the rawness, the clarity. If you’re a fan of Vic you’ll find it a fascinating fleshing out of the man - Hersh allows her friend to talk directly from the page, builds a living breathing portrait from dialogue and memory of the ten years they spent on the road together. But if you’re a fan of neither you will still be swept along and away by a scintillatingly written, startlingly moving book whose real themes are friendship, hope, survival, music, and marriage.

Hersh, Chesnutt and their respective spouses, Billy and Tina make up the characters …

The call? My friend, he said he’d be over. Getting excited? I am.
OK, first of all for fucks sake relax, I can see you shifting in your seat. No-one’s on trial here. Stop being so fearful of incrim­inating yourself. Stop thinking that race is a minefield and just accept that now and then we all get our legs blown off when the way we’re made comes into contact with others. Relax and realise you’ll never be healed from the wound that is your skin. Its colour controls your past and your present and your future. That is not a limitation. Too much nervousness with talk of race, the instantaneous denials and protestations that in particular accompany the white response, a mistaken impulse for atonement, a dealing with, a righting of wrongs, that puts fears of inadequacy and bristling resentment in EVERYONE’s response. Just because I think you white folks have a bigger problem than us lot doesn’t mean we can’t talk, doesn’t mean that I can’t accuse you without you fee…

8 tracks of slimy, sinuous menace from Bisk, as you'd expect with production talent like Reklews, Morriarchi, Jack Danz, Sam Zircon, Sniff and Lee Scott manning the decks. If you're familiar with Blah, with Bisk, with Trellion/Sniff, Cult Mountain, you'll know what to expect: stoner-estate doom and despair, fractured fucked up sounds that mirror the slow unpeeling of one's own eyeballs, loops and beats that sit in this strange queasy place dead-centre between old-skool grit and nu-skool electronics. Stinkin' Slumrock also crops up on the stunning 'Runt'pushing an EP that was already essential into truly stellar territory. A dark nebulae of sound and vision you should get pulled apart by as soon as you possibly can. Superb.